Currently, the microfiber artificial leather produced abroad and at home mostly takes the sea-island superfine fiber as raw materials, experiences the opening, carding and netting process, accepts repeated consolidation on a acupuncture (or spunlace) machine to form a fabric, then has the sea part dissolved (or extracted) by polyurethane padding, coagulation and lye (or solvent) treatment, and finally accepts sanding, dyeing and finishing to make into finished products.
According to different production technologies, the sea-island superfine fiber can be divided into volatile sea-island superfine fiber (volatile island microfiber) and fixed sea-island microfiber (fixed island microfiber). The island in volatile sea-island microfiber is not controllable, featuring non-continuity on the vertical axis, and can be made into microfiber featuring irregular thickness and length through solvent treatment; however, the fixed sea-island microfiber is continuous on the vertical axis, and a kind of symmetrical microfiber featuring a fixed number of islands, as well as consistent fiber and uniform length. The number of islands in fixed sea-island microfiber generally includes such specifications as 16 islands, 24 islands, 37 islands and 64 islands, with 37 islands in common use.
For the nylon microfiber artificial leather featuring volatile island, its volatile island microfiber is usually blended with polyamide and polyethylene or other soluble macromolecule polymer materials at a certain percentage based on the threading process, after the artificial leather fabric is fabricated, and then toluene is used to dissolve polyethylene for fiber opening followed by post-processing. The products based on this process have the fiber monofilament size up to 0.0001 dtex (for fine ones) and 0.1 dtex above (for thick ones). The larger discreteness of size may have certain effect on post-processing and product quality; and, in the process of production, the toxic solvent toluene is easy to evaporate, which has great influence on operators' health and environment. Moreover, the characteristics of nylon fiber itself indicates that related products feature poor uniformity, low color fastness, poor abrasion resistance, no dense hair, low density and other defects, so that there should be certain limitations to its applications.
Non-woven fabric is used as artificial leather fabric, and acupuncture (or spunlace) is adopted to have the fibers tangled together, but this entanglement has its instability, (and some manufacturers add a layer of woven fabric between non-woven fabrics to increase the stability of the product). Embedded with polyurethane resin, but the fiber is relatively easy to fall off from the product, that is, it features poor wear resistance. This process can not form enough three-dimensional fibers with sparse hair on the surface so that the products feel rough and can not meet requirements for use in some areas.